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Wednesday, February 17, 2010

More Jewish than the Jews, Take 43

The legal questions in this case (via), involving a restraining order preventing a Catholic father from exposing his daughter to non-Jewish religious influences (the mother is Jewish), are extremely complex, and raise a number of tough issues from both a moral and doctrinal point of view. That being said, I feel perfectly free in calling the father a dick for his snotty supersessionist view of the Christian-Jewish relationship.
"Catholicism falls right under the umbrella of Judaism."

A court is scheduled to rule today on whether or not Reyes violated the temporary restraining order barring him from "exposing his daughter to any other religion than the Jewish religion" for 30 days. While the restraining order is highly unusual, Reyes obviously knew he wasn't supposed to take her to church, even if he was, "taking her to hear the teachings of perhaps the most prominent Jewish rabbi in the history of this great planet of ours."

Seriously -- can Christians stop doing this? Catholicism is not "under the umbrella of Judaism" -- a particularly obnoxious claim given the centuries we have spent under the jackboot of Catholicism (and Protestantism, to be fair).

We're separate religions. There are some commonalities of tradition. But Judaism and Christianity are, at this point, quite distinct. And more importantly, given the degree to which Christian anti-Semitic oppression has historically flowed from supersessionist ideology, it's really important for Christians who purport to be interested in egalitarian interfaith dynamics to back off this appropriation, and let us have our independent space.

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